Magnetic Applications / Hard Disk Drive

The growth of e-commerce and information demands on the Internet has created huge growth in storage demand. The rate of technology development, measured in data areal density growth ensures that disk drives deliver tremendous value to consumers of data storage products. Compound annual growth in the disk drive market has exceeded 10% annually for several years and it is predicted that this will continue. In 2010 over 600 million units were shipped worldwide. The market is segmented into Enterprise , Desktop, Mobile Computing and Consumer Electronics.

Read Write Heads

The read/write head sensor reads and writes data to the disk. The increasing sensitivity of these sensors plays a large part in the overall areal density growth of the magnetic recording industry.

Hard Disk Media

The drive to push areal density to terabits/sq-inch and beyond means that hard disk drive companies are investing heavily in bringing on new media to achieve this goal. Today, Perpendicular Media Recording (PMR) is the norm. Coming down the tracks are Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR), Bit Patterned Magnetic Recording (BPMR), Shingled media extending PMR, Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) and Advanced Perpendicular Recording.  Magnetic Annealing of patterned media structures is being developed both to assist in defining the physical patterned structure and optimising the materials properties of the recording medium.